TFS Tech News of the Week – August 24 2026

Welcome to Tech for Senior and our weekly news update. We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s jump right into the latest in technology. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. I’m Ryan Brown. This is Tech for Senior. This is Tech News of the Week. This is be recorded on August the 22nd, 2026 for our for our show on Monday, August the 24th. Before I introduce everybody, I just would remind our viewers that if you want to follow along, you can follow on our Facebook page. Just go over to Facebook and type in Tech for Senior and you will find our uh our page and you can follow the articles as we go through. Uh today we have of course uh Hueie Popl from Bradenon, Florida. Welcome Hueie. Uh Murray Stro from Victoria, British Columbia. Welcome Murray. and uh Mike Leman from Monton, New Brunswick. Welcome, Mike. I see. Oh, you got your Mike shirt on, too. Yeah. [laughter] Excellent. Facts about Mike. Yeah. There you go. Excellent. Thanks a lot. All right, Huie, who has the first article? It looks like it is Murray. Yes, I beat uh Mike today. Anyway, uh this is an interesting article. I think they’ve done about 1,500 cases where they tailored the drug to target particular mutations uh for um melanoma which uh was what killed my brother-in-law when he was about 50 years old. And uh I think this is an amazing thing. The way this is one of the the amazing advan advances of AI to the um field of uh cancer treatment. But okay, if you’re interested in robot games, uh click on this. It shows what there’s over 2500 robots competing in the world humanoid humanoid robot games in China. So uh it’s interesting to see what they are capable of. Well, phones are getting more expensive, particularly iPhones. So you can now lease an iPhone and this article talks about uh leasing programs available through Apple and uh on leasing your next phone. Uh we talked about this before on our um on previous shows. Google has begins rolling out Android’s controversial new sideloading flow. This is going to allow you to sideloadad programs into the uh Android phone without going through the Play Store. Uh there’s some interesting things about that such as once the once the app gets installed, it won’t work for 24 hours. Well, uh well, Google checks it out. But, uh lots of controversy over this. a good article. You might want to have a look at it. The global smartphone market is about to fall about 14% in 2026, but Samsung is expected to retake the number one position. And this was done by a data research firm. I guess, you know, that doesn’t really surprise me. I mean, as we’ve seen recently, the new phones coming out, not really a big difference than the previous ones, but lot more expensive. So I suspect that will with the tight um with the high cost of RAM that will probably continue to be a problem. Um this this tells you um how to apparently there’s been some notices that people have been getting that their computer has been infected by uh malware. And this article tells you how to find out if you really were or if this is a false alarm and what to do about it if you have Uh, for those of you who have Proton Mail, um, they are going to organize your emails automatically. Now, you’re going to say to me, well, Gmail has been doing that for years. Retabs on the top. And you’re going to say, well, Gmail’s been doing that for years. But Proton Mail can’t see your email. It’s all encrypted. So it’s unlike Gmail which actually reads your email to sort them into the tabs. Proton Mail is taking the metadata from the uh from the email and able to discern that and it’s going to put it into six different categories for you. Uh this is an article on Samsung is ending support for these Galaxy tablets in 2027. You can look at the list there. I guess the reason I put the article in was it’s important that you check your older tablets and older devices because it when the support ends, so does the antivirus and security features. So you need to know when these these uh devices are unsafe to use. This is a list of the tablets that will be ending life support for uh in 2027. This is very interesting. Um Rayban is bringing out a new um set of glasses. These are called Ray Neo and it’s going to be both minimalist and maximalist with its latest AR smart glasses. These will have um these will have a lot of features. The most important feature it doesn’t have is a camera. There is no camera on these glasses, but they will do um they’re going to do a heads up display on this on the screen of the glasses, so you’ll be able to see that. But they will not have cameras. And I think this is something because of the security issue with these cameras. I think this is a big plus for these glasses. We’ll see how they turn out. Nokia um probably haven’t seen one of their phones for a decade or more, but they’re still getting $2 billion$2 billion or more dollars a year in revenue from the patents that they had on their phones way back when. This is a Canadian story. Best Well, I actually it isn’t it because Labor Day or the holiday in Canada or in Canada is is coming up of course in September, but Best Buy has their sale on today. Um, I just looked at this and Google’s Pixel 10, 128 gigabyte, is $450 off. If you buy a Pixel 11 today, you get a $500 gift card. Some really incredible deals at Best Buy now. Uh, check out the uh check out their online sales. Uh, this was kind of interesting and I’m not so sure that I’m really excited about this. some changes coming with Claude. Claude can now read and reply to your Gmail messages without user approval. So, uh, I’m not so sure I’m ready to give up that yet. And we just talked about phones going up in price. Well, guess what? Amazon just jumped the price of its Echo devices, uh, Fire TVs, uh, their Kindles, and their networking product, the Euros, uh, this week. about $30 a piece. So, uh, for example, an Echo Show 11 went from $219.99 US to $2.49 US. Uh, 16 gigabyte Kindle from 109 to 149. Uh, and guess what the problem was? The price of RAM. Okay, this was a surprising one. The weather app on Windows 11 actually uses a lot of RAM, so you might consider turning it off if you’re having trouble with your RAM usage. In summary, the Pixel 11 is an excellent phone. The problem is it’s not that much different than the Pixel 10. So, there are some software changes that have occurred. Uh, but I think the the idea is if you if you need a phone and you want a good phone, then the Pixel 11 is is is a good option for you. But if you own a Pixel 10 or a Pixel 9, not much difference. Keep your older phone. The Tesla solar roof program is dead. Uh, the problem was uh well, a lot of problems. wasn’t that popular. And also when they installed it, the installers, the company installed all of them, uh, only put it about half an inch above the roof. And this created a lot of heat. And when the heat is hot, then the the the generation of electricity goes way down. Uh, so there was lots of problems with this. Anyway, the uh the solar roof program is now over. For those of you who are students, obviously we’re our readers are mostly seniors, but if you have maybe some kids in school, uh Google is now released a Google announced this week that it will be giving if you’re if you are going to a educational in an educational program, they will now give you Gemini, they’ll give you the pro plan for a year on Google. So, this is a good value, probably about a $250 value. Uh, you just have to apply for it and say that you’re in a recognized school of education and you get a year of Gemini for free. After years of holding out to promote its own payment solutions, Walmart is rolling out support for Apple Pay and Google Pay at select Walmart and Sam’s Club uh locations starting August 24th. The company expects to expand this tap to pay functionality to all of its stores by the end of the year, followed by its fuel stations in 2027. Mike, this is kind of interesting stuff. Battery technology is about to shake up the whole industry, primarily EVs initially, but uh certainly everything else. Excuse [clears throat] me. One of the places that we’re going to see a big change is the fact that number one, China is the one who’s stepped to the forefront and become the uh the innovator here. They took technology that Canadians and North Americans looked at years ago and improved on it. And now we’re going to see salt batteries, which they can produce at about onetenth the cost of a lithium battery and have 8 to 10 times the range and be recharged probably 100 times more uh than the uh the lithium that we’re using currently. And so salt normally also doesn’t have the environmental impacts, the dangers from fires and exploding and all that good stuff that we’ve had with lithium batteries. So look for salt battery technology coming near you soon. But the big, you know, the big news article that I don’t think we put it in the the list this this week, but the big news article of the week was Toyota. Toyota has now signed an agreement with BYD. And BYD, a China firm, as you well know, will be making all Toyota batteries in the future. Google Maps now has the ability to let you blur your house out. Now, it’s a one-way thing, so once you do it, you can’t undo it. But this article talks about some of the reasons why you why you might want to. And certainly, one of the biggest things is your personal security that the bad guys are using Google Maps to scope out and uh look at your home before they decide whether they want to try and break in and rob you. So you can blur your home out and uh make it invisible to what it looks like on uh Google Maps. So Mike, did you know this? Small but mighty Halifax ranks number two as emerging North American techhub. It has been for a long time, believe it or not. You know, even when I graduated from college, uh I don’t want to say how many years ago, uh 1977. So that’s what you know, pretty near 50, right? Anyways, it uh it was a burning uh technology area at that time and there’s a lot happening down there. This is an interesting article as well. San Francisco Bay Area dethroned as the largest tech talent market. Guess who’s number one in the United States? New York. Chat GPT can now send texts for you with the new Apple Messages plugin. Um, Timex. Who has a Timex? Who’s ever heard of Timex? Well, obviously if you’re senior, you have because we all owned Timexes and we bought Timexes for what, under 10 bucks, Hueie? Uh, anyway, Timex is still producing watches. expands its retro sports chronograph watch with several new variants. Cost you about $200. Gone up a little bit since the $10 watch. [laughter] The FDA has approved an automated device that uses special light and sound technology to find vein and draw blood from a patient’s arm. It can also apply the tourniquet, dispose of the needle, and place a bandage. Although it’s not yet a common sight in medical offices,